alph Messenger is a cognitive scientist with a fondness for cheating on his wife and ruminating on the nature of human consciousness. Helen Reed, widow and moderately successful novelist, arrives at the fictional University of Gloucester to teach creative writing, where she finds herself gradually drawn into the Messengers' social circle and Ralph's romantic snare. Thinks might sound like an...

Well Read Column by Robert Weibezahl

Like fellow Brit Muriel Spark, David Lodge is a writer of comedies with decidedly bleak underpinnings, and his new novel shares a funereal kinship with Spark's comic masterwork of death, Memento Mori. The main character in Deaf Sentence is losing his hearing, but as the punning nature of its title implies, the book offers a broader consideration of aging and mortality. Odd subject matter...